the product pages of our site, for example this page, seem to be auto-generating a META DESCRIPTION that contains the entire 3 paragraphs of content of our Product Summary fields. this is a WordPress shopping cart plugin. the product editor pages have no place to manually enter a META DESCRIPTION so somehow it gets auto-generated.
should we be concerned that this is too much content to slap into a META DESCRIPTION? don’t search engines only want this to be about 2 sentences long?
Take a look. Recommended length is 155 characters or so. Basically a longer one will just be truncated. I’d definitely advise you to find that out and either custom modify it or whatever you have to do to adjust it… extra-long descriptions are generally not useful, in my experience.
Especially since it is using the product description in it’s entirety as the page description.
IMHO it would be better to have nothing there and let the search engines use the page content if you can’t figure out a way to get it to describe the page.
Whatever your cart plugin is, is probably set to utilize the Product Description field as a Meta Description source. You just happen to have long descriptions. Does that field itself have a SUMMARY separator for the text area that you can insert? Perhaps the plugin is smart enough to only use the summary (the bit above the line separator, if it’s an option).
Alternatively, you can probably use an SEO plugin to override the meta description value “above” whatever the cart generates. Check out the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast, it’s the leader.